Tuesday, July 26, 2022

I'M NOT SURE JOE BIDEN CAN WIN A CONTESTED PRIMARY IN 2024

For Joe Biden, this looks bad:
A new CNN poll finds 75% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters want the party to nominate someone other than President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, a sharp increase from earlier this year....

The poll shows a sharp downturn in enthusiasm for a 2024 reelection bid by the President. In January/February, 51% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said they wanted someone other than Biden to be the Democratic nominee in 2024.
But there's more: In a poll of New Hampshire Democratic voters conducted by the University of New Hampshire, Biden is losing to Pete Buttigieg by 1 point.



Sadder still: Biden isn't even a popular second choice. Only 2% of respondents pick him an alternate. (Cory Booker, Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Stacey Abrams all crack double digits.)

Biden finished fifth in the 2020 New Hampshire primary -- Sanders, Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren all finished ahead of him. But he's the president now. This shouldn't be happening,

And I know that New Hampshire is much whiter than the Democratic electorate nationwide. But according to that CNN poll, only 27% of non-white Democrats nationwide want Biden to run again, which is only marginally better than he does among whites (22%).

No primary challenge to a sitting president has succeeded in the past half century -- Ronald Reagan did some damage to Gerald Ford in 1976, and the same is true for Ted Kennedy when he ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Pat Buchanan when he ran against George Bush in 1992. But if Joe Biden doesn't right the ship, I suspect he'll be quite beatable. If he's still struggling in a year but decides to run anyway, will other Democrats conclude that challenging him is bad for the party? Or will they conclude that not challenging him is bad for the party?

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